Friday, November 30, 2007

homestyle chicken noodles

I was anxious to make home made noodles since Jack's mom taught me how over Thanksgiving. So when I had an open afternoon, I went for it.

I started by roasting a chicken in my usual fashion. It was accompanied in the roasting pan with cloves of garlic, shallots and an onion.

After I took that out of the oven to rest, I started on my noodles. I used 1 cup of flour, 2 eggs, 1 teaspoon baking powder and some salt and a splash of milk. As I mixed, I saw that it was too sticky, and I probably ended up adding another 1/2 cup of flour. Knead the dough for about 5 minutes, then roll it out and cut it into strips. Boom. Noodles. I dusted these pretty heavily with flour, then let them sit while I dismantled the chicken.

I took most all of the meat off the chicken. That was ugly, as I am still awful at cutting up chicken. It didn't matter much for this, as I just needed all sorts of chicken pieces. Once mutilated, I covered the bones, skin, cartilage, junk , etc. with some water and made it into a rough stock. I let it simmer, which I knw is kinda a sin in stock making, but I was doing what Jack's mom did, darn it. And her's turned out yummy...

As for the veggies that roasted with the chicken, I pureed them all together to make a sort of spread, which also served as a dip for my brussel sprouts. Mmmmmm....

I acutally did all this last evening, then put everything separately in the fridge and made the meal tonight. So after a pretty hectic day at work, all i had to do was roast some brussel sprouts ( a bag of frozen sprouts with butter, salt and pepper and some garlic cloves), heat up the stock, add some water and boil the noodles (and all the flour they are dusted with...this is important because it thickens the sauce) in the stock.After the noodles cooked for about 12-15 minutes (this time may be shorter for fresh fresh noodles, but mine sat in the fridge overnight), I added a couple handfuls of pulled chicken, and continues to cook everything at a boil for like 15 minutes or so, until the noodles were tender.

So that was dinner. Roasted brussel sprouts, roasted shallot/onion/garlic puree to dip the sprouts in, and chicken and noodles from scratch. Pretty simple, but oh so nice and warm and comforting. The smells in the apartment are awesome. Like Nonna's house the day after Christmas. Or Jack's family's house the day after Thanksgiving...

And with that, I accomplished my post per day in November for NaBloPoMo! Woo! That wasn't so bad, was it. Oh wait, that means tomorrow is December!! Wah! I'm not ready!!! :)